Channel 69 - The Pleasure Channel

11-7-12 – Lat: 23.36 Long: 111.00

45 miles off the coast of the Baja peninsula, 80 miles to Cabo San Lucas, night watch, 8:00 PM, no wind, motoring at 5.5 knots.  80 miles to Cabo sounds  close, but if you do the math we still will not arrive until 2:00 PM tomorrow.  Yeah, we move pretty slow.  What to do for the next three hours while Elizabeth and Laura get some sleep for their watches to come?  If you can’t find things to do to entertain yourself for hours at a time,(remember TV, internet, and cell phones aren’t options) traveling on a sailboat may not be for you.  This is where I turn to Channel 69 on the VHF.  Better known as the “Pleasure” channel. 

The VHF radio is always an important part of your boat gear, but is generally thought of as a piece of safety gear.  A way to call for help in an emergency.  There are many channels designated for different purposes.  16 is for emergencies and hailing other boats only.  Don’t let the Coast Guard catch you chatting away on this one or they publicly chastise you over the radio.  Other channels are set aside to let commercial boats announce their intentions so everyone knows where they are going, others yet are for ship to ship communication etc, etc…  And then there is Channel 69 set aside for “Pleasure” or at least that’s what scrolls across the bottom of the screen on my VHF.

Channel 69 - The Pleasure Channel

For our trip from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas with the Baja Haha, they have designated channel 69 as the working channel for people to hail each other and to conduct the morning nets and inform the fleet of 115 boats about the weather and what’s happening in general.  In theory, everyone monitors this channel all the time, and one boat would hail another, pick a different channel to go to and then conduct their business on this other channel, leaving 69 free for other to hail each other.  It mostly works that way.  Some people forget what channel they are on and conduct their conversation on 69 untill someone else pleasantly, or not so pleasantly, reminds them to “take it to another channel”  The thing to remember here is that everyone can hear you.  In this day when a phone call is heard by yourself and the other person alone, it is very hard to remember that everyone who cares, or is just bored on night watch like me, can “follow” you to whatever channel you choose to go to.

So I know that s/v Perseverence has a bad rear seal in their transmission and need more 30 weight oil, but a guy who has the same transmission says you can use regular old motor oil; in fact he once ran his with sea water in it for 250 hours while on a passage and it didn’t hurt it.  I know who is picking up the teenagers from shore and taking them all back to their respective boats.  I know that someone and someone spend a lot of time talking late at night; and so does everyone else.  I know who caught a 56 inch dorado, who won the election, and when someone asks someone else about the weather they just downloaded, I follow them to another channel and then I know the weather also.  At first I felt bad about following people to other channels and ease dropping on their conversations.  That is until I went to another channel with someone to have a talk and then another person interjected their thoughts.  Unbeknownst to me we had been followed.  From what I can tell, it’s what you do.

The channel gets really interesting when we all gather in an anchorage and everyone is calling their friends to visit and socialize.  Or after the beach parties, there are endless calls for missing flip flops, I can’t find my crew member, my dinghy oars are missing, there’s a blue kayak floating out to sea and on and on.  You can sit in the cockpit and listen to the radio for hours, following the conversations that fancy you and ignoring the others.  It’s better than TV, maybe because it’s actual stuff that’s happening.
You get to know people’s voices and generate opinions of them over the radio.  On some boats it seems only one person ever talks on the radio.  Some people are very needy and have a million questions about stuff that was already talked about.  Some people are very paranoid at night and feel the need to call out the latitude and longitude of every boat they see on their radar within two miles to make sure they are aware of each other.  Some people see the need to announce every time they catch a fish, in fact they have so many fish they are releasing then if they are under 60 inches.  Somehow they think everyone in the fleet needs to know this.

Either way you look at it, the Pleasure channel is just that.  It’s where you get you news, find the weather, report your problems, hear about the beach party tonight, call your friends after  each overnight on the water and find out their position to see who snuck by who in the night and the list goes on and on.  Just remember; you never know who’s listing!

The crew in Cabo celebrating our arrival!
On our neighbors s/v Alcyone